Saturday, January 14, 2012

NFL 2011: Week 19 – Divisional Round (OT)

So I have to warn you going into this week’s NFLuminati Index of a few things… Namely, this time of year it usually becomes painfully obvious to me (as I am ultra-aware) that the NFL is fixed. And it’s important to remember that this means “engineered” typed fixed and not “choreographed” type fix. It’s hard to find smart employees nowadays, regardless of the industry, and there’s no way you could actually have like 45 dudes per football team truly understand a full script of a game, memorize, and actually perform their roles well. But you position a few key insiders into key roles and the whole affair is easily pushed in desired directions. I also feel like that the feeling of this is not so strong during the regular season because at that point, a lot of it is wide open at times. The NFL does not need to engineer every detail, or else it would become obvious. But come the playoffs, a lot of it does seem engineered, and has seemed so to me for over a decade now. Can’t help it… I’m naturally distrustful of things.This is because most of my life has felt like me vs. the World, and it is only the past couple months that I think I’m finally ready to say the World has won. I’m whooped. My dreams are dead. There will be no great future for me; I’ll be lucky to die where I’m not too far in debt that my shitty budget life insurance policy can pay it all off. Some dude sent us a $50 donation, specifically for Neil, I used it for gas, then out of this paycheck became overwhelmed by my financial drownings, and didn’t even paypal that shit to Neil. $40 fucking dollars. (He was gonna pay to renew the domain for the year out of his donation.) What a pathetic piece of shit I am. But that’s the row I’ve hoed, and I’ve hoed it well, albeit halfheartedly at times.And then I get mad, because I feel like I’m saying strong shit inside this interweb, maybe not on the prolific level Neil has kicked the past couple years, but fuck man, I’m nearing 40 and realizing MY DREAMS ARE FUCKING DEAD! There is work, sleep, die in my future. That’s it. All the Real Man shit that’s been written, it means nothing. But little weasel-faced halfwits get paid blogging gigs or shine from false witticism dens like Grantland, and we just sit here, nonsense gibberish which is actually perfectly sensible dissection of the world around us, yet we don’t pretend to be so holy and righteous about sports. So we don’t get shit, except older and weirder. And then one day you wake up and look in the mirror and realize the Great Dream was all a fucking lie to distract you from the day-to-day, and once the haze clears and you see the day-to-day, there’s really nothing left to do but fucking wish for a hollow point to bore a hole through your head.This is where the NFL comes in, and most great cherished forms of mass entertainment. It was Stanislav Zizek who said, “religion is the opiate of the masses” and he was right. But of course, no one cares about religion anymore because our god is now the Shine of the New as ordained by Science & Technology. (It should be noted that I am technically a scientist by trade, and through extensive personal research will tell you that actual opiates make a much better opiate than religion.) But the great sports entertainment is a distraction/opiate for us to forget our real lives we are uncomfortable inside of on a full-time basis, and at this time of year during the playoffs, important psychological memes are driven home, whether we realize it or not. But it is happening.I am against engineered reality. I’m against reality to be honest with you, and frankly with the depressing realization that this is it, I am against all things. Blow up the world for all I care. Unleash Cormac McCarthy’s worst nightmares as filtered through the minds of a thousand primates poisoned by Philip K. Dick-style angel dust. Let it fucking go. Which I would imagine is a popular unconscious sentiment in this world right now, festering just below the surface of the electrosmog, which just like Kesey laid out in the first few pages of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, they will cut up, this weekend, as what I heard the stupid AM radio call “the greatest football weekend of the year” goes into full press on our collective brains.Now I’m sure many of you are like, “Man, football isn’t fixed, and this is a bunch of jibber jabber bullshit.” But be open-minded friend, and watch this weekend’s game with even just 10% of your thought stream thinking of these things. Note the strange ways things play out during the games. (And somebody paypal $50 to neilabfree at hotmail.com, to bail my shitty ass out, or else Neil can get in line with the collection agency from North Carolina and the hospital bills from last year’s Super Bowl and the creepy gypsy Jew lady who hovered back into my life to try and reclaim my trailer camper from the past this last month. I promise, I’ll square everything up when I do my taxes – the Earned Income Credit: a poor man’s grant to buy off another year of life.)Fuck it, let’s just jump into this…#1: GREEN BAY PACKERS (15-1, 1st overall, 10.0 rating on a 10-point scale) – A good example of how the NFL engineers things is this Giants at Packers game, which echoes the great storyline from a few years back when the Giants beat the Ol’ Gunslinger himself in Green Bay in weather so cold that your face could freeze and your nose break off which is what they used to do in the old days, Packers breaking off the noses of opposing RBs in the bottom of the pile. But this is the new NFL and what they didn’t tell you is the Frozen Tundra actually has heating coils going underneath of it, so the ground is warm and supple, like a vagina, and for as cold as it was, the players only really suffered briefly, like walking from your warmed car to the entrance to Whole Foods on a winter day.But the Giants Super Bowl win that year, as well as the Packers win last year, as well as a lot of Super Bowl victors of recent memory, have come from the wild card ranks – the all-American tale of coming up from below championship level, working together, peaking at the right time, and being the best. That is the illusion of the American Dream right there, that patience is a virtue and you will overcome, even if not as ordained great as others around you. But last weekend, that was shot, and no wild card team won at all, so we are left with nothing but the eight division champions. I am not entirely sure what this tells us about the future direction of the American Economy, but I am sure it’s not a good psychological conditioning we are undergoing right now. The Republicans are shaving retards off the fringes of their mock nomination process, and Obama is cooking up his very own war-mongering October Surprise with Iran, and between Bush’s Executive Orders and the powers granted Obama over the past 12 years, straight dictatorship has been given legal backing for the position of President, if necessary by emergency (but who decides the emergency?), and the economy certainly still seems to be teetering not settling. I have been looking for a schoolbus on govdeals.com to buy for cheap and turn into our own Joad family jalopy. Times are weird, and uncertain.So yeah, all home teams won last weekend – all champions. And yet somehow the storyline is being pushed that the Giants are this year’s “peaking at the right time” football team that could go into Green Bay and pull off the upset. At least that’s what the TVs and radios were saying this week. But it was only a few weeks ago that everybody was like “lolol one of them has to win I guess” about the Giants and Cowboys. And the Packers were, by far the best team this season (as displayed by my NFLuminati Index rating). There’s no one even close.Thing is, like with the wild card teams of note in previous postseasons, the NFL does not like to crown the King come playoff time. The most notable example of this was when the otherwise perfect Patriots dropped that Super Bowl to stupid Eli Manning and the Giants. The NFL just does not make the supposed King be the actual King. It’s bad for business.I have not decided whether this will play out like that again, or if the NFL is looking to crown Aaron Rodgers our new Brady Manning, as we don’t really have one right now. One Super Bowl championship does not do that. But supplanting the Ol’ Gunslinger, and then winning back-to-back titles? That would seal Aaron Rodgers.I don’t know. It’s hard to say what the NFL will push upon us. But I do not see them pushing the Giants over the Packers this weekend. This was an elaborate ploy to build up an alleged top-flight opponent for the Packers to dispatch of in their opening playoff game. There will be some highlight-ready Lambeau leaps, and Eli Manning will do his frustrated Manning Family Yuckface at some point in the second half, and then we will see how the unspoken plans develop in regards to the Packers in the next week or two.#2: NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS (13-3, 2nd overall, 8.5 rating) – The Patriots being pushed to high heaven as the greatest thing ever, right around 9/11 when we were all encouraged to “let’s roll” against Islam and fixed rate mortgages and things like that, that was when I started to really distrust all of this NFL madness. How could a guy like Tom Brady – a failure to some degree as a collegiate starter – become the Greatest QB of Our Generation? Sketchy tuck rules and snow games and all sorts of bullshit contributed to the process.But it’s been a few years. And one thing to remember as I talk of these shadow conspiracies is that the entire network of Illuminatis is not a well-organized, streamlined machine. It’s a great bureaucracy. This is why you can’t have every player know how things must play out. This is why local dudes joining the local Freemasons look at it as a fraternal organization where they do charity work. Because it is. So it’s hard to understand if one tentacle of the beast can easily tap into the other tentacle of the beast and be like, “You know what Brother Goodell? It’d be great if we could have people rally around the term ‘Patriot’ one more time.” The bureaucracy is large and inefficient, which ultimately will be what enables its demise.Oddly enough though, the Patriots find themselves against Tim Tebow and the Broncos, in a rematch of a game that was a blowout a few weeks back. Tim Tebow is the Jesus freak guy – homeschooled born again super athlete. And think back on America’s historical origins, where Christ-based fringe churches were willing to float across a seemingly endless fucking ocean to find freedom from the oppression of the Catholic church. That religious freedom was mostly for religion about Christ, sure, but not the fancy gilded brutality of Catholicism. And yet you can’t throw a pissy snowball in the greater Boston metropolitan area without hitting some alleged Catholic. Tons of grandsons and daughters of immigrants who hold onto the Catholic ways, despite the torture and molestations and obvious historical hypocrisies.And here comes the homeschooling lover of Christ spirit, who feels a Jack Chick pamphlet tucked into a phone booth is just as righteous a path to the Good Lord as fancy sacrament in satin robes. And the Brady/Belichick genius machine is certainly the football kin to the Catholic church – as respected an entity as there could be. And the ragtag Tebow option offense/wacky Bronco defense is as perfect a pagan church to that football tradition as you could conjure up. The fucking option, in the NFL. Long fucking pass plays off the option, against the vaunted Steelers defense last week. (It should be noted, for those that still refuse to believe the engineered NFl talk I talk, how the Steelers/Broncos game last week conveniently went long, into primetime, for an almost perfect at 8 pm exciting overtime finish, where Tebow dropped to a knee in celebration to his Lord. You couldn’t have timed that shit better if you taped it beforehand and edited it to fit. And of course, it was the highest rated wild card game in nearly 20 years. Which means the NFL can now ask for even higher rights fees next time around.)I can’t cypher the tea leaves on this game. You have to figure the Brady/Belichick machine will get one last hurrah at some point, being it is the most illuminated chapter of the NFLuminati process’s recent history. I mean they fucking got the former Broncos head coach as their assistant in the past two weeks. What kind of bullshit is that? But also I did not think the NFL would push Tebow past last week, and they did. I feel like there may be more to this Tebow thing underneath the surface than meets the eye. Perhaps somewhere in Alabama they have finally bred the flawless red heifer and there are those who are ready to rebuild the Temple of the Mount in Jerusalem to usher in the final days of conflict, thus the build-up to war with Iranian Shi’ites (essentially the Catholics of Islam), and Tebow is all part of our conditioning. Divine intervention, on the football field, to a level never before known. Even wonderboy Brady was forced to bow to His Greatness. I don’t know. I feel like the Patriots will win, as they are the second best team in the NFL, despite their defense, but it really seems hard to say with this strange Tebow factor. And John Elway is no stranger to the secret halls of the NFL hierarchy. I know it will get big ratings though.#3: NEW ORLEANS SAINTS (14-3, 3rd overall, 8.3 rating) – The Saints are this weekend’s big question mark game, as you will see from the ratings, they are the 3rd and 4th best teams in the NFL. But as we move into the real NFLuminati mode, it’s important to remember that the Saints are not a powerful franchise. In fact, they’ve been shit for most of their existence, and were only given a Super Bowl in order to regenerate the tourist economy of New Orleans. And sure, they’ve got this Madden Bowl style of new school NFLineering down pat, but they also lost to the fucking Seahawks last year. It is also of note that the two games they played on real people grass this year were two of their lowest scoring games. And the 49ers have an opportunistic defense. Actually, fuck that, as “opportunistic defense” is one of those chump ass phrases; the 49ers are an odd collection of man-beasts, the type of man-beasts that could pressure past that Saints O-line and get an INT or two to break up Brees from “Drew Brees great dude” to “Drew Brees, every now and then he has a game like this.”The real test is the throwback 49ers offense that leans heavily on a RB. If they can beat up the Saints defense, could be a great game. But if they fall behind even slightly, you can’t do the “let’s let Frank Gore fuck shit up long enough for Alex Smith to make a couple passes” thing. It should be an interesting test, though just as the Saints are not a great NFL franchise in the powerful sense, the 49ers are one of the big ones. Shit man, Bill Walsh practically took over the NFLuminati for about 20 years. Seems to me the NFL would probably set up a Saints/Packers rematch like the opening kickoff, but they like to not do what you would expect.#4: SAN FRANCISCO 49ERS (13-3, 4th overall, 5.9 rating) – Actually the real key, underneath the surface, to this game is how high shall the NFL push the Jim Harbaugh star? He’s gotten the background hype, ordained as the new Ditka due to his Bears ties, and ordained as the new Bill Walsh because he’s in San Francisco. Do they hotshot this asshole straight to the Lombardi Trophy stand? I don’t see that happening just yet, and the 49ers haven’t had a playoff game in a few years, so it would be completely respectable – in both an NFL is real sense as well as the engineered way – for them to lose out this game and still be strong as fuck in the psychic mind of the masses. That defense look hongry at times.#5: BALTIMORE RAVENS (12-4, 5th overall, 5.0 rating) – The Ravens/Texans game is the worst game of the weekend, because neither is a realistic contender. The Ravens get media hype like they could be, and if every game was played in Baltimore, then they might be, because at home they are a dominant NFL team. But on the road, they are like the fifth member of the AFC West. They did win the AFC North to get a long-wanted home game, so I would imagine things go well for them this weekend. But as soon as they end up playing somewhere else, they will be exposed as the fraud that they are, even though we’ll get 39 stories about “the last run for Ray Lewis”. Man, fuck Ray Lewis and his stupid fucking pre-game dance. And don’t get that twisted, because I have never in my life ever thought negatively of a man who would wear a full length white mink coat and get caught up in a stabbing death. In fact, I generally respect people with that type of back story. But somehow Ray Lewis, despite those facts, has shown himself to be a shitty and false human being. Let’s not forget that even though he wore a full length white mink coat and was caught up in a stabbing death, he testified against those who actually done did the stabbing. And also let’s not forget that stupid pre-game dance.Anyways, the best hope for the Ravens is that the Broncos win so Baltimore can have another home game and not be exposed until the Super Bowl.#6: NEW YORK GIANTS (10-7, 8th overall, 3.6 rating) – Eli is the only stupid member of the stupid Manning family cluttering up my goddamn January football. I can’t stand the Manning family, ever since that dog rape story got buried by the media. Sure, Mike Vick punishes a couple of underperforming pet athletes and gets sent away to federal prison and becomes public enemy number one, to this day, for a lot of folks, who respect the lives of dogs more than humans. “I hope they throw him in a cage, like an animal, to punish him for treating dogs like animals, because that is wrong.” I always loved the hypocrisy of that thinking, that by treating animals badly you should be treated like an animal. That’s like the thirtysomething hipster’s version of the “against abortion but for the death penalty” thing Republifuck candidates do. But nobody gave a shit about an actual incident of bestiality. I don’t know; maybe we’ve progressed. I would be happy with that, because we have two pygmy goats, one white named Sugar and one brown named Nutmeg, and with their fluffy winter coat, I kinda want to fuck them sometime. They’re just so damned cute, and usually when I see cute things I want to jam my penis into it.#7: HOUSTON TEXANS (11-6, 11th overall, 2.4 rating) – I was surprised the Texans won last weekend, not because of any rookie QB factors or none of that “let’s pretend this is real” bullshit. I just didn’t think the NFL would allow such a shoddy franchise with such shoddy unmarketable uniforms. But they did. Really, this Texans/Ravens game is gonna be an uninteresting foreplay into the late game on Sunday. I don’t even really want to talk about it, though it should be noted that despite their crappy uniforms, I am probably even more disappointed in the Ravens uniforms when they started. My birth middle name is Raven, so I expected in my honor something chill as fuck. Instead, black and purple, and yet somehow screwed up. How do you screw up the colors of malevolence and codeine cough syrup? You be from Maryland, and thus retarded, that’s how.#8: DENVER BRONCOS (9-8, 15th overall, 1.3 rating) – I am rooting for Tebow at this point, because I am rooting for End Times. Like I said, my dreams are dead, and if my dreams must die I would hope it is at least exonerated in the cleansing chaos of an apocalypse. If my dreams are dead and there’s no divine intervention or world war or something to distract me from reality, then I will be forced to actually retrace my own mistakes. I don’t want to do that, and right now I’m having trouble finding actual opiates. I guess there’s always painkiller abuse (like always), but there’s something so blissful about the hazy dream world of smoking actual opium. And to smoke opium and watch football where some weird barely good QB somehow keeps winning? Even better. And to smoke opium and watch some weird barely good QB somehow keep on winning, over stupid Tom Brady, with shitty Phil Simms on mute and pumping DJ Burn One’s The Ashtray so goddamned loud shit is vibrating off the desk? That would be a real nice way to spend a Saturday night. But no actual opiates. Just fucking Bibles and football. Fuck this world.

To be honest, I've come to really like Tebow. Not like chill with like but tolerate like, because 99 out of 100 Jesus freaks have that blank look in their eye, but that 100th one is genuinely genuine and usually ends up starting a homeless shelter or autistic kid program or some shit and does a lot of good. Tebow comes across as that type. I would imagine he's not even playing football in five years, from his own choice.

ARMCHAIR LINEBACKER!

Football. No matter what anyone says, this is the true national pastime, and because of that far too many of us have been swallowed up by the monster storm called fandom, spiraling further and further into the abyss until finally, all we can do is holler back, screaming into the void hoping that someone, somewhere might hear our fool words.That is what this blog is all about, giving a voice to those who need to just get it all out because their own team has clubbed them over the head one too many times. We are all idiots, utterly without dignity or decency, but we are fans and we believe despite ourselves that somehow this football thing will someday be worth all that idiocy and pain.If you think you have something to say about your team, or if you just want to say hello or hell, even if you just want to yell at us, hit Raven Mack up at ravenmack at gmail.com or Neil up at neilabfree at gmail.com and before you know it, you too may be gibbering like a lunatic for the world to see. Come, join us, and we will gnaw on the bones of the wicked and the foolish together. Football. What can we say? We love it.

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REGGIE ROBY!

Reggie Roby is the human mascot for this blog because while everyone was all up-in-arms about black quarterbacks, he was silently The Black Punter. Not only that though, because he was the best and wore a wristwatch on his arm to create the factoid of hangtime, because he knew his shit, even though it looked like he didn't. Reggie Roby personifies the open-minded know-it-allness punter mentality of The Armchair Linebacker. That's our man.